Home Cooking

I walked into the house after a particularly intense morning yoga class to find my extended family sitting around the dining room table looking at me expectantly, as if they were in a doctor’s office waiting room and I was the nurse who had come in to deliver
some important news.

I realized with a start: they were all waiting for me to cook Sunday brunch for them.

It was the first time we had gathered with our extended family in over a year. I had complained for months to anyone who would listen that what I missed the most during the pandemic was entertaining, hosting friends and family for a special meal. Finally, all of us were fully vaccinated and it was the moment I had been waiting for.

So why did I feel so annoyed, so unprepared, so caught off guard?

Before COVID, I thrived on spontaneous gatherings, especially around food. The kitchen is my domain. It’s my happy place. I’m not neat and orderly when I cook, but like a tornado. The detritus of meal prep is part of my process, like splattered paint on a Jackson Pollock painting. There is no real order to my chaos, only pure joy. There I was—finally getting the one thing I had wished for—yet this return to so-called normalcy felt suddenly unfamiliar.

I had no choice but to harvest whatever I could find in my fridge and make it work, like something out of one of those cooking competitions on the Food Network.

The first thing I found was a dozen eggs that had been lovingly hand-gathered by my girlfriend from Carbondale who talks about her chickens with so much love and affection it’s kind of confusing. While I’ve never understood the obsession, I will admit these eggs were beautiful: large and plump, in various shades of brown and blue. Score.

I opened the crisper drawer to find a bag of raw baby spinach, red potatoes from Rock Bottom Ranch, and a package of premade pesto from Blue Moon in Boulder that I had picked up the day before at Skip’s Farm to Market in Basalt. I fried the potatoes with chopped bacon, garlic, and onion, and wilted the spinach. I whisked the eggs in a big bowl with a large dollop of pesto, poured the egg mixture over my fried ingredients, and stuck it in the oven. Once the eggs were set, I topped the frittata with sliced Swiss cheese and shaved parmesan and broiled it until it was bubbling and crisp around the edges—glorious.

“Oh my god, this is so good,” my dad said, sitting back and closing his eyes in a moment of true appreciation. I knew from regular conversations with my mother they had gotten pretty lazy about cooking (we’re talking premade frozen meals from Stouffer’s) and hadn’t eaten at a restaurant in over a year.

Everyone else nodded in appreciation and it hit me why this mattered so much: It’s about so much more than food. It’s about being together, at long last, enjoying a family meal. ❧